


you touch my wires

by Snickfic



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Robots & Androids, Cyborgs, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Pittsburgh Penguins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-01
Updated: 2017-10-01
Packaged: 2019-01-07 11:47:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12232215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snickfic/pseuds/Snickfic
Summary: Sid stood with Tanger in the locker room and shared the news: the Pens were shutting Tanger down for the season. His neck needed rebuilding, which meant surgery, new wiring, joint reintegration.“But I’m going to come back,” Tanger said, lifting his eyes from the carpet for the first time. “Next season, good as new.”





	you touch my wires

**Author's Note:**

  * For [downjune](https://archiveofourown.org/users/downjune/gifts).



> This is HANDWAVED ALL TO HELL. I hope you enjoy, dear recip. <3

A couple of days before the press conference, Sid stood with Tanger in the locker room and shared the news: the Pens were shutting Tanger down for the season. His neck needed rebuilding, which meant surgery, new wiring, joint reintegration. 

“But I’m going to come back,” Tanger said, lifting his eyes from the carpet for the first time. “Next season, good as new.”

“Woo!” said Dales. Olli echoed half-heartedly; other guys were more enthusiastic.

“What about this spring?” Dumo asked. “Are you—offline?” He grimaced an apology as he said it, like he wasn’t sure if the word was polite. His gaze flicked to Olli and back again.

“Nah,” Tanger said, unoffended. “I have to be awake for all the fibers and shit to, like, reattach. I’ll be around.”

Olli waited until the others had stripped their gear off and wandered away to the showers, and then he sat in the stall next to Tanger’s. Tanger didn’t look up from his phone. He didn’t have gear, of course; he hadn’t worn any for a couple of weeks. Today he had on gym shorts and a faded t-shirt with something printed on it in French.

“Sucks,” Olli said. 

Tanger snorted. “Fucking right.”

“It hurts like a son of a bitch. The joint reintegration.”

“That’s what they say.”

Olli didn’t have much else to offer. “Sorry,” he said, and headed for the showers.

* * *

Tanger sized Olli up at training camp, back when Olli had still thought of him as _Letang_ , the Pens’ elite #1. He circled Olli a few times on the ice, buzzing around him like he was catching a sniff, and said finally, with satisfaction, “You’re borg.”

“Yes,” Olli said. It was listed on the roster, right next to his name. It was not a surprise.

“You know there can only be one,” Letang said soberly. “On the Pens. One borg. It’s in the rules.”

Olli looked at Letang’s serious face, and he took a gamble. “We can change the rules.”

Letang broke into a grin. He punched Olli in the shoulder: hard, with precision. No pulling up like he surely did with all the pure biologicals on the team. “Two borgs, eh?” He gave Olli a long musing look before skating away.

* * *

Tanger was out for a week after the surgery – completely out, dead to the world, _offline_. Olli checked in on him once, in the bionics lab the Pens had installed around the same time they gave Tanger his mega contract. It was supposed to be off-limits to everyone except techn and patients, but Olli knew the route to it by heart, and Stewie barely paused before opening the door to him.

Tanger was stretched out on a table on his stomach, nude, face buried in a pillow that kept his neck immobile. A layer of skin was peeled back along his spine, exposing the matte gray knobs of each vertabra. 

Offline bodies were nothing new to Olli. He’d been one of five borgs on the team, his last year in Finland. “How’s he doing?” Olli asked.

“Eh.” Stewie shrugged easily. “About how you expect. No major snafus, you know?”

“Yeah,” Olli said staring at how all Tanger’s limbs draped so heavily on the table: dead weight.

He only visited the once.

* * *

“I know you have a dick, but like, do you _really_ have sex?” Shearsy was drunk and earnest with it, eyes too wide and solemn for Olli to feel more than passing irritation. 

From across the table, Tanger said, “What’s sex?” A couple of the call-ups tittered, but he shook his head. “No, seriously, what is it? It’s just nerves. Electrical impulses, yeah?” He looked Shearsy in the eye, and after a moment, a little red light blinked under Tanger’s skin, near his temple. Willy, their representative lightweight, giggled. Tanger grinned a shark’s grin. “We know all about electricity. We know how to light someone up. Right, Olli?”

“Sure,” Olli agreed, startled to be included. “Electricity.” He was a little bit tipsy, maybe.

Shearsy nodded, duly impressed, but Rusty said, “It’s not just electricity. That’s bull. Sex is about intimacy.”

Dumo groaned. “You are a such a fucking sap, Rusty.”

“Oh, well, I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Tanger said, jovial mood gone like quicksilver, like the flipping of a switch. “I’m just a borg, right?” He shoved to his feet, jostling the table. Some of Rusty’s drink sloshed onto the remains of Shearsy’s fried string cheese.

“You’re all fucking idiots,” Olli said, and went after Tanger.

Tanger was in the john, pissing out his beer like any biological. Which sounded like a good idea, really. Olli took the next urinal over. “Bullshit,” Tanger said quietly. He tucked himself in. “Fuckers.” He went to wash his hands. Olli joined him a few minutes later. Tanger crossed his arms and leaned against the sink, waiting for Olli to finish. 

“They’re just don’t know better,” Olli said. Tanger huffed. Olli tried again. “People say stupid shit all the time.”

Tanger slumped. “Yeah.”

“They’ll be sorry about it tomorrow.”

Tanger shook his head, smiling, worst of the mood apparently past. “You know, I never play with another borg before you.”

Olli’s next planned words died in his mouth. He had to take a moment to regroup. “Really?”

The smile twisted a little. “There aren’t a lot of us in Quebec.”

“Really?” Olli repeated. “When you got your nervous system as a kid – and all the puberty shit and refinements, all that – you were alone?”

Tanger scoffed at this. “I knew adults like me, you know? And I had my parents. Techs, they told me what it was going to be like, what to expect. And I had friends, eh? I wasn’t _alone_.”

Olli was still stuck on this. He tried to imagine figuring it all out himself, with only techs and manuals for guidance. “The summer I was fourteen, my friend Patrik and I, we got our dick upgrades. We sat on the floor of my room for hours, practicing our boners.” 

Tanger laughed out loud. “That just sounds gay, man.”

Olli flushed for no reason. He shuffled his feet and considered the door. “Yeah, well.” 

Tanger’s hand curling around the back of his neck was a surprise. Olli met Tanger’s eyes. Tanger looked serious and sober and very determined, and every time Olli had ever paired with Tanger on the ice, he’d let Tanger lead. Olli bent, and Tanger kissed him, open-mouthed and instantly filthy. Tanger kissed like he punched, like he played: with precision. 

And then he pulled back. Olli stared at him, breath a little harsh, chest heaving a little. Some things, the augmenting process left alone.

“Electricity,” Tanger said. He looked pleased with himself. Good humor crinkled at the corners of his eyes. “Hey, that was pretty gay, right?”

Olli laughed despite himself. “Yeah. That was pretty gay.”

* * *

Tanger’s progress came in plateaus. The next week he was online again, no longer a corpse weighed down by metal bones. He sat propped up on a massage table in the trainer’s room. “It’s for the stimuli,” he explained to Olli. His attention strayed a moment as he called something to Flower passing by the door. Flower swore, and Tanger turned back to Olli, smiling now. He tapped the side of his skull. “Gotta have input.”

“You can’t pull this shit on me,” Olli said, amused despite himself. “I’m a borg, too.”

“You are such a fucking liar,” Tanger said. “This shit is necessary.” 

Necessary to keep Tanger sane, maybe, and that was reason enough, Olli supposed.

Week three: the playoffs. Columbus. Tanger watched from the owners’ box. He could sit up on his own now and stand for short stints. Week four, still Columbus. The team flew home for game five. Olli arrived at the arena the next morning hours before he was due on the ice. The plane ride had made him twitchy, and he wanted time on the weights. 

When Olli passed the players’ lounge, Tanger was sitting all alone and unnaturally still. Olli recognized a deliberate partial shutdown when he saw it. “Miss us?” Olli said, to say something.

It took Tanger a couple seconds to decide to boot up. His breath deepened, but not much. His fingers twitched.

“Shutting off like that’s bad for the integration process,” Olli said.

Tanger made a face, stiffly: his facial muscles weren’t all online yet. He swore under his breath and flicked his gaze around the empty lounge, and softly he said, “It fucking hurts. The reintegration.” Slowly he brought his hands to his face.

Nobody else would be in for a while yet. None of the players, anyway, and they were all pretty practiced at living their lives in full view of a few dozen arena staff. Olli dropped his duffle next to the sofa and sat down. 

“Fuck.” Tanger’s breath hitched.

“When my shoulder got worked on—”

“Which time?”

Olli huffed. It wasn’t that funny. “When it got worked on, it helped to have someone—massage it, I guess? Work on the nerves. It helps the central nervous system with the remapping.”

“Yeah, the trainers have been working on me. Didn’t really help.” Tanger dropped his hands. “You ever wish we could just take a fucking Vicodin?”

“Yeah,” Olli said.

“Aw, fuck. You’re here to work out, right? You should—”

Olli pressed his fingers to the side of Tanger’s neck, and Tanger stilled. “You can turn around, if you want.”

One beat, two, and then Tanger slowly rearranged himself, one foot folded underneath with his back to Olli. Olli bent his hands over Tanger’s shoulders. Tanger shuddered – involuntary, biological. After a couple of trembling breaths, he said, “Do it if you’re fucking going— _fuck_.”

Tanger was rigid under Olli’s hands. “It’s easier if you breathe,” Olli said.

“Fucking borg,” Tanger muttered, but he tried it: a quick, sharp inhale. Olli kneaded his shoulders a little more. “It’s not really hurting there, it’s more like—inside? It’s all wrong. In my—head.”

“Yeah,” Olli said. He kept kneading. Fiber by muscle fiber, Tanger relaxed. Olli brushed his thumb across the back of Tanger’s neck, over the thin white line of the incision. The techs would smooth it over eventually, but for now it served as a nice marker in case they needed to go back in. 

“I’m going to come back,” Tanger said, startling Olli out of his reverie.

“Of course,” Olli said, and set himself to giving a proper neck massage. He knew what it was like when the pieces of his body didn’t seem to match the space they took up in his brain. It was the jangled, mosquito-whine wrongness that hurt, that crawled through his whole body until it was one fraying wire, one giant exposed nerve. 

But touching helped. Massages, hugs. Yoga sometimes, to remind him where his body was, to reteach him how each piece worked.

Tanger hadn’t hung his head, because that still wasn’t advised, but he’d let his neck sink into his shoulders, his back rounded towards Olli. He was warm under Olli’s palms, always that few degrees warmer than a pure biological. He smelled like one, though: aftershave and the faintest hint of sweat. His broad shoulders straightened and slumped minutely under Olli’s hands with each slow breath.

“Maybe I’m defective,” Tanger mumbled. “A lot of concussions before this. That fucking glitch.” _The glitch_ , also known as the time Tanger’s entire mainframe shut down and he lay twitching on his patio for half an hour before a neighbor found him. His biological half could have died. “I think I’m supposed to be stronger, like, not so breakable. And now this neck thing.”

“It’s in the rules,” Oll said. Invulnerability wasn’t sporting, the NHL said. It’d make borgs take greater risks, become more dangerous to biologicals. “It happens to me, too.”

Tanger twisted to glare at Olli. “It’s in the rules you gotta get your shoulder rebuilt twice in eight months? And a concussion? And fucking _cancer_?”

“The cancer wasn’t that bad,” Olli said, by rote. Nobody ever listened.

Tanger turned away from Olli and dropped into French. It happened whenever English curses weren’t enough. He mumbled to himself for a good thirty seconds, a monologue that rose and fell like a chant and ended with, “Fucking shit.”

This early the service level was still a tomb, silent and buried. Tanger’s aftershave tickled at the back of Olli’s nose. Olli bent and kissed the nape of Tanger’s neck, right over the scar. Tanger took a sharp inhale and was still, utterly and completely, and then, slowly, he turned.

“Sex helps, too,” Olli said. His face was flushed, his pulse abnormally quick. “With the remapping.”

Tanger stared a little longer. Very deliberately, he stood up and sat back down facing Olli. “All the touching,” he said finally.

“Yeah.”

Tanger kissed Olli slower this time than he had in the bar bathroom. He roved the inside of Olli’s mouth like it was Olli’s body he was trying to relearn instead of his own. He tasted like toothpaste this time instead of beer, and his shoulders were firm and strong under Olli’s hands.

He pushed Olli down onto the sofa eventually and settled on top, almost careless, the way he only could with a borg. “I haven’t fucked a borg since high school,” Olli said. Now, with Tanger’s full weight sinking into him, he found he’d missed it.

Tanger looked down at Olli. His hair hung almost in Olli’s eyes. “I’ve never fucked one,” he said.

“Well, now you can,” Olli said, and he rolled his hips encouragingly. Tanger groaned, braced his arms in the sofa cushions, and began looking for a rhythm.

Olli came first in a spray of sparks along his nerves and behind his eyeballs. Tanger followed a few moments later with a bitten-off French curse. He collapsed his whole weight onto Olli and just breathed for a while.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Tanger said into Olli’s shoulder, finally. “Nice to have two of us, you know?”

Olli squeezed Tanger a little tighter. Tanger didn’t even flinch: a good sign, a remapping well done. “Yeah. I know.”

[end]


End file.
